Écrits d'Art Brut - Wild Words & Ways of Thinking

The works of Art-Brut artists are often created to the exclusion of the public, the artists usually live as a social fringe group, in isolation or marginalized. The Basel exhibition Écrits d'Art Brut - Wild Words & Ways of Thinking, which begins Oct. 20 at Museum Tinguely, features international works by 13 people from the art movement. Until 23 January 2022, the exhibition will bring together around 100 works, including loans from more than ten different museums as well as public and private collections from various European countries and Brazil. In addition, documentary films allow visitors to immerse themselves in the lives and work of the artists.

The central focus of Écrits d'Art Brut - Wild Words & Ways of Thinking is to reveal the diversity in the written images of the artists, who for their part concentrate on the visual power of their works and therefore devote themselves to grammar and orthography in a playful manner. In doing so, they reveal a high degree of creativity with their declarations of love, letters of rage, erotic messages, diary-like notes, prayers, or poems, which they sometimes produce in calligraphy, sometimes scribbled, embroidered, or scratched. Their ingenuity is also evident in the different surfaces they use: Pieces of paper, leaves, booklets, books, stone, fabric and textiles serve as the basis for the personal writings of the Art Brut artists and thus become poetic and sculptural all at once.